Food and Faith

Eating is a daily ritual, but in the rush of modern life, it's often practiced in a utilitarian way. We're hungry, so we'll head to the supermarket to buy food. Often, we don't know where it comes from. But there's another story of food and eating. This week, we hear about the deeper significance of our food choices, the growing food and faith movement in Christianity, and explore the many ways in which food helps to nourish community and meaning.

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Transcript

David Rutledge: From food laws and food rituals, to celebratory feasting and observant fasting, the world's faith traditions have long recognised the significance of food and eating.

And if the staggering popularity of shows like Masterchef and the current obsession with food blogging is anything to go by, eating is increasingly on the minds of many of us.

Beyond physical need and sensual pleasure, what's the deeper role of eating in our lives? How does a concern for food and ecology tie in with religious faith, and what's the role of food in nurturing community?

This week we're taking on some of these questions, looking at the growing food and faith movement in Christianity, and exploring the way that our food choices deepen our engagement with the world and each other.

The program's produced by Carmel Howard.

Norman Wirzba: I think it starts by asking the question about why we eat in the first place. Obviously it's to take care of bodily needs, we get hungry physically, but the hungers that we have are so much more and so much deeper than that. I ask people when they think about their own lives and the things that have been the most important to them, those sort of signature moments or those festival moments or whatever they might be, eating is usually at the heart of them. When we are sad we eat, when we are happy and want to throw a party we eat, because eating is one of the ways that we enact our life together.

Carmel Howard: Norman Wirzba is Research Professor of Theology, Ecology and Rural Life at Duke Divinity School. He's written widely about agriculture and food systems, and he's the author of Food and Faith: A Theology of Eating.

Norman Wirzba: So eating, yes, it takes care of physiological needs that we have but they are also a way that we move into a human life together, where we can explore what it means to be a human, where we can explore the kinds of lives we'd like to see each other live. So it's a really deep economic, social, political, cultural, ethnic, you name it, all the dimensions of our human life somehow find their way into the eating that we do. And that's what makes eating a wonderful lens to think about so many human issues.

Carmel Howard: So what happens when we do think of food as a commodity, as a product?

Norman Wirzba: I think it results in a rather disastrous relationship to the world, and I think we are seeing that when we look at how industrial food systems have had the effect of really distancing our understanding of food from any vestiges of the working of nature. And when that happens we end up treating the whole world as if it was just one big consumer place, a vast store or warehouse, if you will. And as long as that happens the only kind of thinking that matters is the economic thinking in which you ask questions about price, convenience, availability, amount, those kinds of things. And anything like something called the sanctity of the world or what we might also call its moral dimension just disappears.

So the commodification of food has the effect then of drastically reducing the rich meanings of food. The eating that we do is never simply a solitary act with you and some commodity on a plate. The moment you take a bite into anything, you are connected with ecological and agricultural and sociological and cultural and gendered relationships that show us that the illusion of the self as some autonomous individual is really a deception.

Fiona Leiper: My name is Fiona Leiper, and I became involved in this particular venture just through my community, so I tend to spend a lot of time connecting with people who are engaged in the conversation around environmental sustainability and social justice and also spiritual fulfilment. And, for me, food and the story of food at the moment and the transformation that is taking place encapsulates all of those things.

Carmel Howard: I'm speaking with Fiona at a community garden dinner in Brisbane, during Fair Food Week. Fair Food Brisbane is a non-profit organisation dedicated to raising food awareness and transforming the way we think about eating.

Fiona Leiper: People are beginning to really wake up and go; hold on a minute, this food system and the food that we are being made to eat, even within supermarkets and things, it makes no sense. And they are really turning to reconnecting with people, reconnecting with the earth and the seasons and the excitement of planting lettuce seeds and watching them grow, and that taste of really fresh food that has come directly from your backyard. I absolutely think it's an enormous change that's happening. The markets where I shop, they are just crowded with people. A lot of people might just be going for economic reasons, to save a bit of money, and others will go because they really have a connection to the importance of supporting local farmers. But either way, it's fantastic because over time you learn more, you speak to people, the whole story of food begins to influence your actions.

Carmel Howard: And tonight, what's significant about this night?

Fiona Leiper: This night is really a fabulous example of what can happen when a group of like-minded people share a vision and get really excited by how that vision can bring forth something different, how it can engage other people in the community. A small group of people, they get together, they decide to go ahead and take a chance and do something, to be the change that they want to see in the world. And tonight is just a beautiful example of what can come out of that.

So this evening there is a group of people coming together to share a meal, and the food that's going to be served for the dinner is all sourced very, very locally. So in fact we are sitting in a beautiful community garden, a whole lot of food has been grown here as a result of people coming together, they all give their spare time to working here, so a lot of the produce will be directly from this garden. So it's a very local, community based, coming together to share food.

Carmel Howard: What do you think happens when people become disconnected from the food on their plates?

Fiona Leiper: Well, I think that we unconsciously stop caring about the quality of our soil, we stop caring about the quality of the water, we stop caring about the quality of the atmosphere and the air, we stop caring about whether there are bees in the garden or not. And so we've stopped taking into account all of the complexity of life that goes into generating the food on our plates.

Fred Bahnson: To me the soil is a very sacramental thing because it's the giver of life. And I love this idea that somehow those mundane things of the world, the ordinary things of this world become bearers of divine grace, of mystery.

Carmel Howard: Fred Bahnson is director of the Food, Faith and Religious Initiative at Wake Forest University School of Divinity. For several years, he directed a faith-based community garden called Anathoth. His most recent book is Soil and Sacrament, and he reads from it now:

Fred Bahnson: 'I spent much of my time at Anathoth Community Garden preparing and working and thinking about the soil. There is an entire ecosystem in a handful of soil: bacteria, fungi, protozoa, nematodes, earthworms. Through their breeding and dying, such creatures vivify the world. This pattern of relationships I find a captivating mystery; I love plants, but I am most attracted to the fervent and secret work that goes on beneath the surface. Soil is not dirt. It is a living organism, or rather a collection of organisms, and it must be fed. Soil both craves life and wants to produce more life, even a hundredfold. Soil is a portal to another world.'

You know, I didn't grow up with any kind of gardening knowledge or any kind of desire to grow food. I grew up in Montana, I grew up in the mountains, was a skier, a climber. To me the outdoors were just a great big playground, and it just really didn't dawn on me that I had any role to play in caring for those places in which I played.

And I encountered the writings of this guy Wendell Berry, he's a poet, an essayist and a novelist, and it was really reading Wendell Berry and coming to sort of understand what I would call an agrarian vision of the world that was kind of the beginnings of my journey. And then also I went to work with a group of Mayan coffee farmers down in Chiapas, Mexico, and really saw that agrarian vision lived out in the lives of real people.

These people were growing most of their own food, they were raising coffee as their cash crop. And of course, being a North American middle-class person I totally romanticised their life, when in fact they were living in poverty. But they had this beautiful way of life that was very connected to the land. And to me that was a vision of wholeness, of living in harmony with one's surroundings that I saw there in Chiapas, and I wanted to claim that as my own, and that led me to return to the States, do an apprenticeship on an organic farm and begin learning some of the skills to grow food.

And I came to understand that growing food, becoming a caretaker of the earth, that's really a way of rooting yourself, and I see growing food, especially growing food the way that builds soil and that improves the local ecosystem in which you find yourself, growing food that way to me is a responsible way to live out your life.

Carmel Howard: In a recent op-ed piece for The Washington Post, Fred Bahnson examines the connections between Christian spirituality, food production, and the important task of gardening.

Fred Bahnson: When I say we need to return to our most basic human task I'm referring to the Genesis story where God forms the Adam from the Adamah, God forms the human from the humus, and then gives the Adam, the first human, this task of tilling and keeping the Adamah, of tilling and keeping the soil on which all life depends.

By and large we've not lived up to that task of tilling and keeping the garden, we've industrialised that whole process and we've depended on fossil fuels and machines to produce our food, and I think we need to return to a more human way of growing food, a more human way of caring for the garden rather than this industrial model that we currently have.

We are operating now with so much disconnection from our food that we really have no idea of how our food was grown or how it came to us. And so we are eating immorally without even knowing it.

Here in the United States most of our meat is raised in very inhumane conditions. Here in North Carolina hogs are raised in confinement, they live out their lives on concrete, knee-deep in their own excrement, and the workers who work there are not paid fairly, the hog waste is sent out into these big lagoons, these big ponds, which periodically break. The hog waste flows into the local water supply and people get poisoned and you have all kinds of ecological problems with that. By eating those hogs we're participating in an unjust, immoral system. We are sort of doing that by proxy, you might say.

And so we can stop eating those hogs, which is pretty simple to do, you just refuse to eat pork unless you know how it was grown. That's taking a moral stance. And I think in as much as we can keep doing that, we will change our food system. It's happening slowly and people are saying, you know, I'm not going to eat that way, I'm going to eat locally and sustainably, I'm going to buy my pork from somebody who I trust who raises those hogs on pasture, who gives them a good life, who pays their workers fairly. So in as much as we can begin making those kind of choices, we can begin to change the food system.

Carmel Howard: As Fred Bahnson suggested earlier in his reference to the Genesis creation story, there are several allusions in both the Hebrew Bible and Christian scripture to agriculture and food, with God described as a gardener, farmer and shepherd, and Jesus as the 'bread of life', who wants his sheep to be fed.

But in a Genesis verse that's long been criticised for enabling environmental and animal exploitation, God creates man in his own image, blesses him and then says 'be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth and subdue it; and have dominion'. I asked Norman Wirzba from Duke Divinity School about the concept of 'dominion' and its implications for agriculture and sustainability.

Norman Wirzba: I think that's an important passage. It's an infamous passage in a way because it has taken a life of its own. I think we have to start by realising that something like a command to have dominion means something very different to people depending upon the time in which they say it. So to say that we should have dominion over everything that moves, everything that lives, everything that creeps, as Genesis does, to say that in an industrial age or an atomic age or a nuclear age where we've got bombs and we have very elaborate heavy machinery that can literally transform the face of the earth, dominion means something very different then than it does, say, in the period in which Genesis would have been written and read by people in ancient Israel where we are talking about an agricultural society. Dominion could not have meant anything like it does for people today where dominion means the right to exploit.

And I think a way to enter into it is to ask something very basic, something that farmers are constantly asking which is that if you have animals under your dominion, that is under your power, you can't live with them in a way that is beneficial to you or to the animal if you simply impose upon them what you want. To work with animals becomes the primary objective of good farming, because to not work with the animals is to bring about financial ruin, economic ruin to the farm.

And the same thing could be said about having dominion over a piece of land. As a farmer you decide that you have 10 acres and you want to put 10 cattle on it because that would be sustainable, that this field could support 10 animals for a length of time. If you thought that to make more money you could put 50 cattle on it, you would quickly undermine the field's productivity, and in doing so bring ruination to your own farm.

So from a simply pragmatic point of view, that kind of thinking would have been foreign to a farmer living in a world in which the life of animals is as important as the life of human beings, because animals and fields are the very source of livelihood that you need. And you would never, at least if you were at all a sensible farmer or gardener, you would never undermine the fertility of your farm for the sake of some ulterior objective.

Carmel Howard: Norman Wirzba. In his book Food and Faith: A Theology of Eating, he examines how eating has become primarily an economic act, at great cost to agricultural workers, animals, and the environment. He believes that we're more likely to abuse what we take for granted, and he suggests that we pay closer and more grateful attention to the creatures and plants that we're putting in our mouths.

Norman Wirzba: I think saying grace is an act that shows you first of all something about the fact that you don't take your own life or the life that you need to keep your own life going, that you don't take any of that for granted. At the heart of saying grace is a gesture of thanksgiving or gratitude. And when you think about what thanksgiving means, you realise first of all that thanksgiving is not an easy thing to do because it presupposes that you have some knowledge of what you're trying to be thankful for.

And in our industrial global food system, that's not always easy to do because when people sit down and they look at the food that's on their plate, they often don't know where it's come from, under what conditions it has been produced. And so you are not in a position to say thanks with any kind of intelligence or sympathy, because if you were to discover, for instance, that the meat on your plate that you are about to eat was produced in conditions that are inherently brutalising of animals and workers, would you still want to say thank you for that? I think that's a complex moral matter.

But I also think that saying grace is important because it becomes a way for us to live in the world in a way that brings forth its value. And an example I think can make this clear. I was teaching a group of students who were interested in sustainable food systems, and the class was beginning with students bringing their meal, it was an evening class so they brought their supper to class and were eating.

And I asked them how many of them said grace before they ate, and they looked at me with a real puzzled expression. And I said, 'Well, you want people to care for the world, don't you?' And they said, 'Yes, that's why we are here studying environmental issues.' And I said, 'But you have just treated the food that you are going to eat as a commodity, which means that it's just a product of human invention or human ingenuity, and that means that you've treated the whole world as just one more example of the store or a warehouse. And why should we care for just some sort of commodity?'

And they were quite surprised by that. Saying grace can just be a ritualised gesture that doesn't have much meaning, but if we do it with very much intention we are asking ourselves what is the character of the world that we are going to eat, and we are also asking ourselves what is a morally appropriate gesture, a stance that we take with respect to the world in which we live? And I think saying grace becomes a way of introducing into people's imagination the sense that we need to be grateful, that we need to be thankful, that we need to also then be responsible for the food that we eat.

Carmel Howard: So grace can be a political act in a way as well.

Norman Wirzba: Well, I often say that, that saying grace really is a political act because if you look at your plate and you see that the food that is there has been unjustly produced, unjustly processed, unjustly provided and prepared, that then commits you to a different form of eating which is of course then a political statement.

Carmel Howard: During Fair Food Week in Brisbane, I caught up with Hope Johnson, who researches sustainable food systems. She believes most Australians want something different to a food system controlled primarily by two giant supermarkets. She told me about the Australian Food Sovereignty Alliance, and the People's Food Plan, a grassroots movement which reflects the concerns and aspirations of consumers, farmers, community organisations, smaller food businesses and health advocacy groups.

Hope Johnson: The Australian Food Sovereignty Alliance started in 2010. It was a response to the national food plan that was a federal policy document which we disagreed with because it was very corporate orientated. So there was less focus on farmers and smallholder farmers, and there was less focus on for example food insecurity and the community involvement around food. And it also didn't focus on organic food or environmentally sustainable food practices to a great extent.

When we realised that we weren't getting a lot of headway with the national food plan, we created our own, and it's called the People's Food Plan. That's kind of a bit more representative of what Australian people want. So we talked about what they wanted, how they envisioned Australian food systems. So when I say food systems I'm talking about from the seed to the farm to the consumer to the waste. I'm talking about the whole situation. And I guess the Australian Food Sovereignty Alliance is concerned with all aspects of sustainability of the food system.

The People's Food Plan advocates for fair trade instead of free trade. So right now Australia as a nation doesn't want taxes on their imports and exports because that makes the products that they are importing less marketable. So we are arguing more for fair trade, so we actually want protection for our farmers so that their products are cheaper so that we buy more of Australian food instead of buying more food from, for example, China. And this helps our economy and it also helps smallholder farms if we can work that into it somehow. So I guess we are very much for fair trade instead of free trade where things get too competitive for our farmers.

I guess I became interested in the dynamic there because as an urban woman I'm not out in the farm, but since learning about it more it has really broadened my perspective as well, and I've become a lot more interested in fair wages. And I'm also very interested in environmental sustainability.

Right now agriculture is one of the biggest if not the biggest contributor to our environmental problems. I'm doing my PhD on sustainable food systems, and then I realised I was in my office a lot. By being involved with Fair Food Brisbane I have been a lot more practical.

Carmel Howard: Do you have any kind of urban farm in your backyard, or are you involved in a community farm?

Hope Johnson: I've started growing my own herbs, and I have my own compost bin because I'm a big believer in food waste being a major issue, so I'm really trying to limit my food waste. I'm also part of a community supported agriculture, Food Connect. So I get a lot of my bread and milk and vegetables through them. So it has really been a journey, a lot of different things, realising what soil is and why soil is important, and then also how to cook seasonally. Like, I don't go out and grab tomatoes when you are limited to what you have, and I think it makes you more creative, but it also makes you appreciate what you have more.

Carmel Howard: You're with Encounter on RN. I'm Carmel Howard, and this week we're exploring the way we eat, and some recent thinking about food and spirituality.

In her memoir, Take This Bread, Sara Miles traces the important role food has played throughout her life.

Sara Miles: Well, I spent a number of years working in restaurants as a cook, back in the day, before restaurants were fashionable or part of the cultural life of the city, when it was just incredibly hard work. And yet working in restaurants taught me a great deal about solidarity. You get pretty close to people when you're working next to them in a steaming hot room for 10 or 12 hours at a time. And it taught me about hospitality, what it means to serve, what people are looking for in that experience.

And after I left the restaurant world I became a war reporter in all different kinds of countries, and one of the most striking things for me about that experience was almost inevitably wherever I went, in all kinds of places, I was a stranger and I was fed by other people. Again, solidarity. Solidarity even in the face of death, and deep hospitality in the very riskiest times. So I believe that contact with other people was really how I understood food.

Carmel Howard: A chance participation in open communion early one morning at a church in San Francisco developed Sara's thinking about the urge to feed and be fed, and led eventually to her conversion to Christianity.

Sara Miles: It began to make deeper sense to me. The meaning of hospitality and solidarity that I found in restaurant kitchens or in wars, that turned out to be also in addition profoundly spiritual. And first of all you can say, well, that's because the Bible of course is just crammed full of food—grain and salt and wine and figs and pigs and oil and fruit and seeds and bread—but then more importantly I think because what Christianity reveals through the incarnation is God made flesh, which is to say that a spiritual life—eating and drinking and sleeping and touching—a spiritual life is a physical life.

So, like Jesus, I began to understand that we too are flesh mixed up with spirit, and so that we meet God and we meet other human beings through our bodies. This is a God who makes a shared meal the very centre of his teaching and who eats rather notably with the wrong people, who actually rises from the dead in order to have breakfast with his friends. It's difficult to see someone who says, 'My flesh is real food,' not to understand that as being quite core to who Jesus is.

Carmel Howard: I'm just wondering, Sara, if this whole concept of the eating of Jesus, which is at the heart of the Eucharist, was this a difficult thing for your secular friends to swallow? Because you came from a secular background.

Sara Miles: I did come from a secular background, and I think there are of course two things; one was what did my friends actually think, the second was what did I dread that they would think. And my fears about other people turned out to be, as they usually are, about myself more than about them. But at the same time I do think that it was odd at that point when I took my first communion, I knew exactly one other person who was a Christian, and I felt as if something had happened to me in the taking of that communion that made no logical sense. I knew that it was true, but I couldn't believe that it was real, and yet it was real, but I couldn't believe it was true.

So I sort of went around like that, rather poleaxed. As a friend said, 'You look like a deer caught in the headlights,' for a while, trying to reconcile what was happening, which was that I was eating an ordinary piece of bread and taking a sip of ordinary sort of nasty wine, and that God, who I hadn't really believed in at all, was alive and was in my mouth. Trying to reconcile those two truths was a little confusing, to say the least.

I don't think that what I'm trying to do as much anymore is make sense of it in a way in which I want to prove something or try to work out an intellectual argument for what I'm doing. I think I'm understanding faith much more as what compels and pulls me forward towards seeing more, towards seeing more life. What we say at Saint Gregory's when we offer communion is simply 'Jesus welcomes everyone to his table', and so we offer the bread and wine which are Christ's body and blood to everyone, without exception.

What's interesting to me about that is that nobody is receiving bread and wine because they are good, because they deserve it, because they believe a certain thing, they are simply being offered it out of love. And in fact, even beyond the idea that you can't earn or deserve it, I find it profoundly moving and important in a world in which food is so commodified, that this is the one meal that you simply cannot buy. Nobody can buy communion, you can only be given it as a gift.

And the food pantry that we run at Saint Gregory's that we've now run for 13 years was modelled quite explicitly on the way that communion is practised there. In other words we are not giving food to people because they deserve it, we are offering food out of the abundance of food that there is and offering food out of love.

We set up the food pantry around the altar, smack in the middle of the sanctuary. And so I think, unlike a number of food pantries, both secular and Christian, and ours I should say is actually secular, it's in the church but you certainly don't have to be a Christian to participate, our food pantry doesn't ask people to prove that they need the food, to prove that they deserve the food, to prove that they are good, we simply pile up somewhere between five and six tonnes of fresh food every single Friday right around the altar. We set it up like a beautiful farmers market somewhere in heaven and give it away to anybody who shows up.

I think the innovation that we are most interested in is rather than setting up a food pantry as a place where nice church ladies or middle-class social workers will offer food to poor people, the food pantry that we run is run by the poor people who use it. As I found out in my work in restaurants and my work in wars and around the altar table, they are people feeding one another and are being empowered to love and to feed one another.

Carmel Howard: The sense of connection that comes from sharing food is apparent each Wednesday night in Brisbane's inner-city suburb of Fortitude Valley. Wesley Mission prepares and serves a hot, three-course sit-down meal, and everyone's welcome to attend. The meal's been running for eight years.

Angela King: My name is Angela King and I'm the volunteer coordinator at the Wesley Mission community meal. So every Tuesday we go to the food bank and pick up some donations to cook with. Depending on what we get there, that dictates what kind of meal we have on a Wednesday night.

What are we going to do, John?

John: Possibly beef, onion and potato pie. We've made it before, it was about six months ago, but we try to vary the meals every week. Hopefully Neville is going to bring some fresh vegetables so we can make a nice vegetable soup.

Angela King: OzHarvest is a part of Wesley Mission, and they are a service that goes around and picks up food from different places, supermarkets, fruit shops, cafes even, and they just deliver it to organisations that need it, so that's us. So we get a lot of fresh fruit and veggies from them, which is awesome. We really depend on that.

So sometimes we think that we're not going to have much. For example, I was thinking we'd have to use canned fruit and yoghurt for desert, but now Neville has arrived and so we have beautiful cherries and strawberries and apples, so they'll cut all that stuff up and make proper fruit salad, which is really nice.

We have volunteers who come every week and do the cooking, and that happens throughout the day on a Wednesday, and then on Wednesday night we have volunteers who come and they do all of the washing up and the serving. So the meals get taken to the tables and served to the clients, to sit down and just enjoy themselves, they don't have to scrape their own plates, they don't have to line up for food. It's just a treat. So yes, that kind of mingling, kind of family community atmosphere happens. And because they all come…well, a lot of them come every single week, it is like this kind of hanging out together, and we try and encourage them to take their time over the meal because they are used to rushing their food, just to sit and enjoy and talk to each other.

Yes, we have these amazing two ladies down at this florist in the Valley on James Street, and every week they give us this huge bunch of flowers to put on all of our tables, and it just transforms this space. You can see that it's quite bare and it's your typical community space, and it just becomes this beautiful bower. It's just awesome.

Carmel Howard: On Wednesday afternoons the kitchen's buzzing with volunteers. Some of them have had experience of being homeless, like the head chef, John.

John: So all the vegetables that we got from OzHarvest; turnips, potatoes, onions, carrots, corn…

Lyn Burden: We wanted a venue and a space where people could be served, and that meant having an opportunity to have conversation with people, sitting at table, made to feel welcome and accepted, and being given a nutritious three-course meal. I guess that's what makes it different. All sorts of people come to the meal. We don't ask them who they are or why they are coming or anything like that. Sometimes families will hear about it and it's a free meal, so it saves them a little bit of money that they are eking out of whatever money they are receiving. Everyone is welcome.

Some of the people who come have some difficulties sitting at table and having conversation, but as they come they begin to engage in that. So the food provides the basic need, and then from that we can build other important needs that people have. When you are living, some of them, on the street, there's not a lot of opportunity to talk to people safely without having fear. We've tried to provide a really safe environment, and that's what God is all about, forming relationships with God and with each other.

I think Jesus spent a lot of his time trying to help people to understand the hospitality of God, and so with the meal it's about accepting people. Each person is a child of God, and we want them to feel that within the atmosphere.

Angela King: Nice and full? I like it, the fuller the better!

Norman Wirzba: I remember reading a commentary on Luke's Gospel in which the writer said that in Luke's Gospel, Jesus is either at a meal, going to a meal or coming from a meal throughout the whole gospel. I mean, it's an indication I think first of all about how attuned people were in this culture to eating. Much of the economy centred upon eating. And so the question is how does eating become a window into how we think about relationships.

And what's fascinating about Jesus I think is that he's the one who is constantly breaking down the barriers that keep people from eating with each other. We see this, for instance, most graphically in the Acts of the Apostles where we are told that Peter, who was a Jewish Christian, is supposed to eat with a gentile. And traditionally Jews don't eat with Gentiles because Gentiles eating different kinds of foods, and this is not just particular to Jews and Gentiles but applies across the world. If you don't want people to intermarry with other ethnic groups, you don't let them eat together because eating is this profound act of intimacy.

Well, in the story Peter does not want to eat with the Gentile, and so God sends down this vision to Peter in which is revealed to him that all of the food that is provided in the world is clean, and therefore can be eaten by a Jew, and therefore can also be shared with a non-Jew. And this is a vision that God has to give and repeat to Peter three times, because it's an indication of how difficult it is to get people to realise that eating should not be an obstacle to fellowship and therefore to intimacy with people across different ethnic, gendered, racial lines.

And so one of the ways to think about Jesus is that he rejects so many of the systems and the policies and the practices in society that keep people apart, that Jesus is trying to be a reconciling presence in the world, and that one of the ways that reconciliation happens is when people take the time to eat with each other.

Carmel Howard: Dr Norman Wirzba again, from Duke Divinity School.

During the holy month of Ramadan, Muslim people fast during daylight hours in a practice of spiritual reflection and restraint. Each evening, they gather to break their fast with the iftar meal, and they often extend their hospitality to people from other faith traditions and the wider community.

Abdul Celil Gelim: My name is Abdul Gelim, I am the executive director of the Queensland Intercultural Society. Ramadan is a very special month, and also it's a great chance for the Muslim community to integrate to wider community, to come together to talk to each other, to understand each other.

In Ramadan time every day we try to organise something. We organise iftar dinner between some institutions, universities, and also we organise iftar dinner at the Parliament House to bring politicians, journalists, senior academics, and also multifaith and community leaders together to understand each other. And also I advise my community to open their houses with home iftar dinners.

Carmel Howard: I'm in the Coskun family kitchen, and Canan's preparing a range of tasty dishes.

Canan Coskun: This is cracked wheat, it's burghal, very traditional. It's like rice, but I've cooked it today with a bit of onion, so you sauté the onion and the capsicum. So we usually have this next to our meals instead of rice. So it's either rice or burghal. This is our soup today. We can't have iftar without soup.

Carmel Howard: That's the way you start the meal, is it?

Canan Coskun: Yes, you've got to have soup, yes, traditionally. And again, it's a very traditional lentil soup, but I've kind of made a different version of it, it's got some celery, potatoes, carrots and zucchini in there. It's actually called Sultan Mahmud soup, it sounds very grand, like a Sultan soup. I hope everyone enjoys it today actually.

Carmel Howard: It smells beautiful.

Canan Coskun: I know, I know, I can't wait to eat it, I'm starving, because I'm fasting myself as well. I can't wait to eat.

Abdul Celil Gelim: Do you know, many Muslim people, they establish their ghettos around the cities, they never communicate, they never integrate themselves with the wider community. This is a big, big problem actually. And in all religion we have to live peacefully with our neighbours without looking at their religion, their ethnicity. Our Prophet advises to Muslim society at least seven families, seven houses, right side and left side, that's your neighbours. You have to communicate with them, you have to look after them, you have to share your food with them.

Canan Coskun: We break fast with a date, that is a tradition, the Prophet's tradition. And then we'll have our soup, we'll have our meals, then we will have tea, Turkish tea with sweets, and I've made sekerpare today which is a very traditional sweet. It's got almonds on it, and then you cover it with syrup. Very yummy hopefully, if it has turned out.

Abdul Celil Gelim: When we open our house in Ramadan to our neighbours, we come together, we understand each other, and also food is one of the best things, you know? Everyone loves food! When we eat food we communicate around the table. Good discussion when we eat food. So this is a good chance for us to establish a harmonious commuting.

In his book Soil and Sacrament, Fred Bahnson explores the ways in which feeding other people is a spiritually nourishing act. He describes a local cook, Rosetta, for whom food is the physical embodiment of prayer.

Fred Bahnson: Rosetta runs a local restaurant here in Asheville, Rosetta's Kitchen, and it's a vegan restaurant and she serves paying customers, but also if you don't have money you can go and eat there. And Rosetta also comes out and feeds workers at local community gardens for free. And when the Occupy movement cranked up here in the US last year, when they came through Asheville she fed pretty much several hundred people who happened to be passing through.

And so for her, food is the expression of her deepest convictions. I think that's what she was speaking to when she said it's the physical embodiment of prayer. Rosetta does not claim any certain faith tradition when I asked her about that, but she said, for her, feeding people is how you connect to people, it's how you reach them. To feed people, to give them that gift of her good cooking was to give them some of her deepest held convictions.

Carmel Howard: Fred Bahnson directs the Food, Faith and Religious Leadership Initiative at Wake Forest University. His work draws on models like the Lord's Acre, a Christian community garden that grows organic food for those in need.

Fred Bahnson: So my role there is really training and equipping religious leaders to create what we call or redemptive food systems. And really we're training and equipping faith leaders to do the kinds of projects like Susan Sides at the Lord's Acre is doing. There's just a lot of potential for churches and faith communities to use their land, to use their capital, their volunteer base, their organising power, to use all those things to create ways of eating that are more holistic, and to create more redemptive food systems in their communities.

You know, it's easy to say I love you or it's easy to talk about love in the abstract, but you get a group of people together and you start putting work into something like the Lord's Acre, you go out and you volunteer several hours a week doing hard work, stooping and bending and weeding and harvesting food, and then giving that food to hungry people who need it, that to me…that's making love visible. At that point love is no longer this big abstract category, it's a plate of fresh kale chips served up with generosity.

And Susan and her friends at the Lord's Acre, they demonstrate that every week. The whole purpose of their garden is to grow not just some squash and beans for the local food pantry but to grow the best, tastiest, the most nutrient dense organic vegetables you can grow and give that to the hungriest people in their community. To me that's making love visible.

Carmel Howard: As he explains in his book Soil and Sacrament, Fred Bahnson's interest in sustainable food systems was largely developed by the ideas of permaculture.

The term 'permaculture' was coined in the 1970s by the Australian ecologists Bill Mollison and David Holmgren, and it's about designing food systems based on the patterns of natural ecosystems.

Fiona Leiper: So the idea is if you want to transform your garden into a community garden or even if you just want to transform your backyard into something that you can grow food, you create a permaculture design, invite a whole bunch of people to come and help you. There is actually a Permablitz community in Brisbane and there's a number of them around Australia, and you become a member and you invite everyone to turn up, and so you get 25 people to your home, you provide all the tools, you provide soil, whatever is needed, and everyone gets in and transforms your backyard. So that by the end of the day you've got a few veggie patches and a compost pile and whatever else you need.

Nancy Kent: So we created this beautiful mandala garden. We had a permaculture design student…

Carmel Howard: Nancy's giving a tour of the garden before dinner begins.

Fiona Leiper: Nancy and Andrew, their story is amazing. They really made a commitment to really be an example for their community. And they had their backyard and they bought this piece of land with that vision in mind, that they would get a whole community of people here and transform the backyard into a garden. And yes, being here today three years on, it's really like their dream come true. It's just beautiful. The garden is so vibrant now, there is so much food growing, we've got chickens, and there's kale and spinach and beans and zucchini flowers. It's amazing.

That is really where our wealth lies. True wealth comes from having a backyard full of rich soil, full of good people, and full of food that's growing, and this sense of place and belonging that comes with that. Intricate things unfold in the simple act of sharing food with one another and eating.

I grew up in a Christian home. So Sunday we'd go to church, and my grandmother would be at home preparing lunch. And so then we'd come home from church and go to my grandmother's home, she lived on the same block of land as us, and the kitchen just full of these fantastic smells of what she was preparing for us for lunch. Then we would sit at a long table, we'd say grace to begin the meal and then talk and have fantastic conversations. So I have a very strong connection to food as being part of family connecting time, knowing where I belong. You know, the ritual of every Sunday, knowing what was going to be served up for lunch and the excitement of that, and favourite deserts that Nan would cook, and being part of a safe place.

Carmel Howard: I'm wondering whether you see a connection between this huge cultural and social desire to be fed and a deeper spiritual hunger.

Sara Miles: You know, it's interesting, a Bishop once said to me that food always points beyond itself to a larger hunger. And I think that that's true. I think that people's experiences of food, for better and for worse, are so primal and so basic. You know, we eat our mothers in order to live, and so our ideas about scarcity and our ideas about being nurtured are just so woven into our earliest experiences and stick with us through our lives.

And then I think food and agriculture reflect the values of the society in which food becomes a commodity or something for sale, and it's very difficult to get back to that essential idea that food is not something that human beings earn or deserve because they are good, but it is in fact a basic human right.

I think that the hunger that food points to beyond itself can't really be met on the one hand by the fanciest, the most exotic foie gras terrine, or on the other hand by the pure, puritanical, uber-Levitical organic bunch of kale that is supposed to be so good for you. Food can be understood really only in action as the thing we have between us. Food is what we have in common, and sharing it with other people, particularly I believe with strangers, takes food out of the realm of fetish and allows it to become something that can change us.

Fred Bahnson: All of this obsession with food, I think it can easily mask a kind of deeper yearning that we have, whether it's a hunger for meaning or a hunger to be connected to others. So many of us find ourselves sitting at the table at dinner time and eat alone, and we tend to not eat very healthily when we eat alone. So I think there's a deeply human need to share food together.

The obsession with cooking shows and the obesity resulting from our current diets, I think those are directly attributable to this lack of connection that we have on multiple levels. We are not connected to the sources of our food, we are not connected to community. And so I think what I wrote about in the book is this hunger to return to a more holistic way of eating, to return to growing and sharing food in community. And each of the communities I wrote about exemplified that in some way.

I loved going to this Jewish community. It was a place called Adamah Farm, Adamah being the fertile soil. And so this farm was in the up-state of Connecticut and it was a Jewish farm where young people could learn the arts of organic agriculture, but also the blend of Jewish spirituality with that. It was during the week of Sukkot, the fall harvest festival, and the week culminated on Friday evening for the Shabbat service, and I'd been reading Abraham Joshua Heschel all week who wrote a wonderful book called The Sabbath. I'd never experienced a Jewish Shabbat, but I knew that it was this break in the week but I didn't know what to expect.

And so when Friday evening came, one of the first things that happened is that everybody turned off their cellphones, everybody turned off their computers. This was a gathering of probably 200 people. And so everybody just shut down their screens for the next 24 hours, and we began the evening with this wonderful meal, drank wine, we had amazing food that was grown right there on the farm. We had this long lingering dinner for the next several hours that Friday night, and ended up singing songs down by the lake. It was just this beautiful…I mean, it was just a big party.

And the whole next day people were just really relaxed and walking around. It really felt to me, as a Christian, not having grown up with that kind of Shabbat experience, it was just amazing how you enter into a different time zone. That one day each week becomes a foretaste of the world to come. And sharing meals was very much wrapped up in that. And so you eat better on Shabbat, you spend more time cooking and you spend more time preparing the table and making it this really lavish, sensory-rich experience.

And so I came away from that experience with a real desire to try and practice that at home. And so my wife and I on our little farm we have since initiated the practice of shutting off all our screens, and we try to have a real family day. And I think when I heard Nigel Savage, who I met at Adamah Farm, when I heard him say, 'The world needs Shabbat, needs a Sabbath,' I thought, yes, that's exactly right, we need to take a day each week where we are just really stopping and pulling back and remembering that the purpose of life is not endless work and endless consumption, the purpose of life is Shalom and wholeness and being together in community and conviviality and join each other. And the practice of Shabbat I think trains us to live into that kind of reality.

Norman Wirzba: I think the Sabbath is about taking the time to learn to delight in the goodness of the world, the love of God revealed in bodies, in good food. And learning how to delight takes time. And so if you can take the time to prepare a meal together and then to share it with other people, and in that learn to see the beauty of the food, the beauty of the people that you are eating with, but also the struggle and the pain that are manifest there, that we can come more fully into the presence of each other and see how we can be a gift to each other, that I think is a profound experience. And also I think an experience that really encapsulates so much of what our living is ultimately for.

I think it's no accident that the first creation story in Genesis 1 ends with God's own Shabbat in the world, delighting in the goodness and the love revealed in the created world. I think it's also a reason why when people talk about the life of heaven they often describe it as an eternal banquet or as the eternal Sabbath in which people come together and they experience the goodness of all that has been made.

And you've been listening to a program called Food and Faith on RN's Encounter. Thanks to all who took part. More details of the program are available at our website, where you'll find streaming audio and podcast links. Technical production this week was by Jim Ussher, and I'm Carmel Howard.

Guests

Dr Norman Wirzba

Research Professor of Theology, Ecology and Rural Life at Duke Divinity School

Fiona Leiper

Speaker, facilitator, life coach & QLD director of Be The Change (a not-for-profit community educating people about sustainability and meaningful living), and supporter of Fair Food Brisbane

Fred Bahnson

Writer and Permaculture Gardener. Directs the Food, Faith and Religious Leadership Initiative at Wake Forest University School of Divinity.

Hope Johnson

Researches Sustainable Food Systems at Queensland University of Technology, co-founder of Fair Food Brisbane, and supporter of the AFSA (Australian Food Sovereignty Alliance).

Sara Miles

Founder and director of The Food Pantry. Director of Ministry at St. Gregory of Nyssa Episcopal Church in San Francisco. Her writing has appeared in the New York Times Magazine and the New Yorker.